Kenya Likely To Compensate Somalia Over Oil Exploration On Disputed Sea Area

Kenya could be forced to compensate Somalia over oil exploration on a disputed sea area if the neighbouring country wins a case being adjudicated at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The case lodged by Somalia on August 28, 2014 is set to gain full steam after Kenya lost preliminary objections last year. The government was then required to file a substantive response to the main case in December last year.

The Attorney General who put up a spirited fight inside the ICJ courtroom last year but lost, did not respond to our inquiries. His fate in the wake of Friday’s Cabinet purge remains unknown. In the secretive defense known in court parlance as a “memorial,” Kenya is understood, to have insisted on its boundary with Somalia being along a parallel of latitude as was decreed in the presidential proclamation of 1979. It is also rooting on a second Presidential Proclamation in 2005 as well as its submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UNCLCS) in 2009.